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Securing spade connectors

I’ve just picked up a pair of my favorite speaker cables, Transparent Super, on the used market for a great price. Unlike my old pair, these have spade connectors. 

So it took me maybe 30 minutes to get these cables connected, the actual speaker cables and the network boxes etc are so heavy that it’s extremely difficult to prevent the spade from slipping out of the post. So I’d screw down a speaker side and then the amp end would slide out. 

And thanks to the design of the Transparent cables, the 2 ends are harder to work with because the positive and negative ends are just about 5” long where they split from the main cable, so they are extremely difficult to position and work with. And my speakers have spade jumpers so I’m double stacking the spades on the speaker side which makes it twice as hard to screw down.

I know I can probably send these back to Transparent to get re-terminated but there must be a way to make the spade connectors work… is there a better way to connect these big bastards - do people actually use wrenches to torque down the binding connector posts or is there some kind of trick to make it easier? 

jsqt

Showing 1 response by dhite71

dhite71
377 posts
 

@jsqt I have had some Transparent Ultra G5 for a couple years and am currently comparing to some Shunyata.  I have swapped them about a dozen times over the past few weeks so definitely feel your pain.  I would kill for some bananas haha.

I get them snug with my fingers and then hold the cable with the spade as close to vertical as I can while carefully tightening the terminal with a wrench.  Be very careful to not over tighten as breaking the terminal off would be a major mess to fix.  I do it a little at a time and then test the cable gently to make sure it is secure and then come back a few min later to make sure it didn't loosen.

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